Showmanism at Hampstead Theatre | Review

First performed in Bath in 2022 to wide acclaim, Dickie Beau’s one-man performance, Showmanism, directed by Jan-Willen van den Bosch, with set design by Justin Nardella has now been brought to the Hampstead Theatre to entertain, bemuse or bewitch a London audience.

 

This is an extraordinary show that blurs the line between the performer and the persona being performed. It is a one-man show with a dozen performers. It celebrates the voice without us ever hearing directly from the artist on stage. All this is achieved through the use of a recorded soundtrack of interviews, anecdotes and observations from actors, directors, spiritual gurus and others with Dickie Beau flawlessly lip-synching to each one. He captures every nuance, hesitation, stutter and cough with incredible accuracy, interjecting only occasionally with his own voice, which was captured on tape as he interviewed the subjects he would go on to embody in this performance.

Throughout the piece, Beau moves around the stage with grace and ease, climbing ladders, changing costumes, and even boiling an egg. Unfortunately, his source material is quite static – people talking into a microphone – and Beau sometimes struggles to bring enough movement to the production. He is clearly athletic and very agile, and his classic mime skills (breaking through a glass wall) were impressive, but some actions were hard to fathom out and seemed unrelated to what we were hearing.

The set is a fantastic, stripped-back concoction of items deposited around and above the stage, including a bath full of soil and an orange tree, a chair, a spade, a bucket, a skull, and a working egg boiler. All of the items seemed linked, at least by some tiny part, to the performance, which is also accompanied by visual effects and projections. At the centre of it all is Beau himself who arrives wearing a space suit but spends most of the show in only his underpants. Despite some talk of performance anxiety, one suspects that Dickie is quite proud of his ‘splendid body’ which gets mentioned a few times during one of the scenes…

Among the voices are director Peter Sellars, impressionist Steve Nallon, and drag historian Joe E Jeffreys, but it is the anecdotal musings of Sir Ian McKellen that dominate. Through Beau’s clever lip-syncing, we hear McKellen’s storie,s including interesting reflections on the Passion Play at Oberammergau, and he cheekily suggests that most actors “could do without a director.” It all got a bit self-referential at the press night performance with McKellen in the audience watching Beau lip-synch a conversation about watching a previous production where McKellen was in the audience watching the show, which he is now watching again, etc… There was more toying with the press night audience when Beau, channelling journalist and critic Rupert Christansen suggested that all critics are essentially pointless (I will let you decide that one).

Although Ian McKellen and Fiona Shaw (another of the chosen voices) will be well known to many, the mainstream audience are unlikely to be familiar with some of Beau’s selected people like Mimi Denissi, the Greek actor, or spiritual teacher, Ram Dass. But this is not about mimicry – Beau is attempting something more profound by embodying these voices through a technique he terms ‘rememberment.’ This really is taking performance to a new level, as much art as it is theatre, perhaps. Beau’s use of the word ‘Imaginarium’ early in the piece puts you in the right place – it is almost dream-like at times, and there is a mystical, magical lilt to the whole performance.

It isn’t perfect, it is a bit repetitive and I am not sure that there was a strong enough connection between the various scenes to justify 1hour and 35 minutes. The vocal content is often funny, always interesting, and there are things to learn along the journey, from the way the Greeks built amphitheatres to expand and share sound to how they used masks to express emotion. Some of it is simply funny stories, but at other times, the themes seem pertinent to Beau’s seeming intention to explain how important the voice is and how we can hide behind it.

While some may imagine the recorded audio being equally well served via, say, radio without the medium of a lip-synching performer, Beau is, without doubt, both a clever and hugely talented performer. His technique dissects words and emphasises voices in a way that you have probably never considered before. There will be an audience that is mesmerised by the artistry and there will be others that simply do not get it (“pretentious nonsense,” said my unimpressed companion). I fully embraced Beau’s originality and skilfulness, but I’m not sure there can ever be other productions like this – it could never be a ‘genre’ without seriously diminishing its own impact. Showmanship is a show to see, but one that feels, and should remain, truly unique.

Review by Fiona Gilbert

Spend an evening in the company of stage and screen legends – Ian McKellen, Peter Sellars, Fiona Shaw and many more – as you have never seen, or heard, them before. Channelling a compelling collection of voices, Dickie Beau traces a path through the world of performance in all its permutations, from Greek theatre to nightclub drag queens, from politics to puppetry.

Showmanism is an audiovisual love letter to performance that talks to us about art, about the world, and about being human.

Created by and starring Dickie Beau
Directed by Jan-Willem van den Bosch
Designer – Justin Nardella
Lighting Designer – Marty Langthorne
Sound Designer – Dan Steele

SHOWMANISM
A Concise Histrionic of Performance
Hampstead Theatre
18 June to 12 July 2025